Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Government has
attracted charges of "Talebanising" the country's
education system through blatant censorship of school
history books that question conventional religious
ideology.

The upper house of Parliament had to be adjourned on
Friday amid tumultuous scenes after opposition Congress
leaders accused the Education Ministry of aping the
Taleban by passing edicts against the work of
internationally renowned historians of ancient and
medieval India.

"You have made a mess of everything and Talebanised
the system," senior Congress politician Arjun Singh
said.

The immediate provocation for the uproar was an order
issued to high schools across the country by the
Central Board of Secondary Education to delete, with
immediate effect, portions from textbooks that refer
to controversial issues such as the Hindu caste system,
the archaeological evidence relating to gods such as
Ram and Krishna, and the consumption of beef in pre-
historic times.

The authorities have also commissioned textbooks to
replace existing ones written before Mr Vajpayee's
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 1998.

Hindus, who constitute the majority of India's
population, today regard the cow as a sacred animal
and its slaughter is banned in most provinces.

The meteoric rise of the BJP during the past decade
owes a lot to its espousal of Hindu causes.

In recent years, Hindu nationalists have taken over
several national research and educational bodies,
introduced university courses on quaint subjects
such as astrology and Vedic (ancient Hindu mathematics),
and are now censoring history books.

Heading the list of censored historians is Romila
Thapar, a world authority on ancient India whose book
of the period is part of the best-selling Pelican
History of India.

In her textbook for Class VI students, Thapar examines
the status of cows in village households in ancient
India and mentions that "beef was served as a mark of
honour to special guests" and that "in later centuries,
Brahmans were forbidden to eat beef".

The Government has ordered schools not only to delete
this topic, but to ensure that it is never discussed
in the classroom.

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